Tag Archives: andrew manshel

Say It With Flowers

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A view of the planting beds — on the south, shady side.

Nothing gives you more bang for your public space improvement dollars than plants. When people ask me what the one thing they should do to improve public space, my response is always to institute a horticulture program. Improving the perception of public space is about providing visual cues to users that the space is under social control. Colorful, well-maintained plants send that message in a number of ways. The physical material isn’t very expensive and the skills to maintain horticultural materials are widespread and easy to find. Putting plantings in places where people don’t expect them sends a powerful message.

I knew absolutely nothing about gardening when I went to work for Bryant Park Restoration Corporation in 1991. My father grew some terrific tomatoes in the yard when I was growing up (it was New Jersey, after all) and for some reason there was always mint growing outside the backdoor of the house that we put into iced tea. And that was the sum total of my agricultural experience when I arrived in the Park. From that day to this, I haven’t had a personal garden or even a yard. Continue reading →

MAKE NO GRAND PLANS

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The $600,000 Mistake

The $600,000 Mistake

Daniel Burnham was wrong. I learned this from making a $600,000 decision that turned out to be a mistake. Placemaking/tactical urbanism is an iterative process. You need to learn as you go. It is essential to effectively improving public space to take risks – but those risks ought to be small, manageable ones; ones you can back out of with minimal damage. When ideas don’t work out, for example when they aren’t effective in drawing people into the space, then you need to bite the proverbial bullet and reverse course. That is an important part of listening to the community – admitting that what you’ve done isn’t working when they are voting with their feet (in the wrong direction).

At Grand Central and 34th Street Partnerships in the 90’s we created a sidewalk horticulture program. Our President, Dan Biederman, came back from a vacation France where he saw sidewalk planters and hanging baskets and decided that replicating that experience in Midtown Manhattan would improve the streetscape and the pedestrian experience. Our horticultural team, led by Lyndon B. Miller had already scored a great success with the perennial gardens in Bryant Park. So we went to work trying to figure out how to extend that success to the streets around Grand Central and Penn Station. We were furrowing new ground here because, while some smaller American towns had hanging baskets (like Cooperstown, N.Y.), we weren’t aware of any large city where baskets and planters had been implemented on a large-scale. It was several years before Mayor Daley (who sent his staff to spend time with us in Bryant Park to take notes) implemented the spectacular Chicago State Street streetscape redesign, with its beautiful horticulture program – which eventually expanded all over the Loop. Continue reading →

TAKING SUBURBIA SERIOUSLY

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The house in the suburbs in which I grew up.

 

Joel Kotkin’s latest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us, poses some serious challenges to those of us who focus on urban revitalization, downtown development and the improvement of public spaces. In essence, he asks the question: “What about the suburbs” and using persuasive data argues that it is where most people want to live – and not just here in the United States, but in most developed and developing places around the world. Kotkin’s point is that most people want an affordable place to live, where they can bring up their children, have a yard, a sense of community and good schools – and that means places outside the urban core.

Kotkin distinguishes his analysis from that of Richard Florida, New urbanists and such-like, by saying that while it may be true that over the last couple of decades people are moving back Downtown, and that this may be a good thing, the data shows that it is rather a limited phenomenon and most people still want to live in the ‘burbs. But he goes much further than that. He argues that because of limitations put on housing unit expansion in desirable cities, and the resulting increased density, they are becoming too expensive for any families but the most wealthy. As a result, fertility rates in urbanizing countries are beneath replacement level. Kotkin says that in many/most major cities around the world, since having kids is so expensive, people have stopped having them. His ultimate argument is that in order for countries to grow and remain economically healthy, they need to create policies to encourage affordable housing creation on the peripheries of cities; and those homes should be detached, with yards and a sense of neighborhoods and have good schools. In his final chapter he demonstrates that there are plenty of resources and space to accomplish this. Continue reading →

Gentrification and its Discontents

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The claim that successful urban revitalization results in “gentrification” and is therefore a bad thing is one of those hypothetical objections to placemaking strategies that isn’t based on hard data, a phenomenon about which I wrote as an obstacle to the implementation of placemaking strategies. For the most part, the objection to gentrification by “advocates” for lower-income people is an objection to hypothetical “displacement” of existing residents by new, higher income folks. To put it as plainly as I can, while those advocates (and journalists) often point to anecdotal evidence of low-income people being forced from their homes by avaricious landlords, I have seen no reliable aggregate data in support of that theory.

I’m a student of the strategies for social change that are about bringing people together – not driving them apart. To Dr. King, integration was not only about bringing economic benefit and political power to dispossessed people, but also creating a society where everyone, regardless of background, is treated with equal concern and respect. Social integration is a good in and of itself, creating communities that honor difference. In addition, it seems likely to me, based on observation and experience, that housing and educating low-income people in the same communities as higher income people may well provide those lower-income people with the tools for economic advancement. Segregating and concentrating low-income people seems to lead to higher levels of social dysfunction.

The Furman Center’s most recent “State of New York Housing and Neighborhoods in 2015” (http://furmancenter.org/files/sotc/NYUFurmanCenter_SOCin2015_9JUNE2016.pdf) demonstrates that in New York City displacement through gentrification is not a significant effect, but also tells us some interesting things about the dynamics of improving neighborhoods. I find the Furman Center to be an indispensable, and non-ideological, source of measurable information about real estate trends. They are also quite careful about drawing conclusions from the data – and not confusing causes and effects.

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Getting It Right

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My only prior trip to Cincinnati was in 2004. The downtown was deserted, particularly the central public space, Fountain Square. The neighborhood north of the downtown, called Over-the-Rhine, is the home of The Cincinnati Music Hall (now under extensive renovation), where the orchestra and opera play, had a terrible reputation and not too many years after my visit was the site of political protests related to racial and economic issues.

But a recent visit showed an incredible transformation. The downtown was lively and busy – including at night and on the weekends. Fountain Square had been redesigned – moving the historic fountain. And while it still has a lot of hard surfaces, it has moveable seating, constant activity, food trucks and really attractive and well-maintained plantings. It was busy all the time, and was surrounded by a lively retail mix.

And Over-the-Rhine has become a dynamic, active neighborhood. Most striking to me was that all of the retail along Vine Street, the main commercial corridor, was local – rather than national chains. The stores were a great mix of interesting food, clothing and other offerings. There was a great deal of development activity – particularly adaptive reuse of architecturally interesting commercial buildings into residential developments. Over-the-Rhine, given its 19th Century history as a home to European immigrants, has an abundance of high quality, funky revivalist structures (French, Dutch, German, Moorish and who-knows-what).

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Photos from Cleveland’s Public Square

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Most/all public spaces can be made to work with good programming and maintenance. Below are some images and suggestions as to how to improve this one.

Low maintenance planting beds send exactly the wrong message -- that the space is designed to defeat human intervention.

Needs more colorful, more imaginative plantings. This is a really inexpensive fix. Low maintenance planting beds send exactly the wrong message — that the space is designed to defeat human intervention.

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